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Dec. 21, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:20
24 Health Care Part 3 - A 'right' to heath care?
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Time Text
Well, good evening.
It's a little bit after.
I guess I went home, and for those interested in the minutiae of my day, I went home, had something to eat, and went to the gym.
My wife is working late tonight, so I'm going to go and have a thoroughly enjoyable time shopping for a disastrous Christmas present that no doubt will be returned, but which will be fun to give anyway.
And for those who are tracking the most important aspects of these podcasts, yesterday I lost a travel mug.
I drove off with the travel mug steaming with hot tea on the top of my car.
And, you know, reality working in its mysterious fashion.
It reappeared, although I parked in a completely different spot today.
It reappeared right by my door as if a sign from nothing.
There's no God and no fate.
So to finish off this discussion on healthcare, I wanted to talk briefly about what happens when you put the irrational sort of moral arguments into place that I talked about just sort of in the previous podcast, and what are the sort of effects, and how could things be run better, and all this kind of juicy stuff.
Well, the way that I... I mean, one of the main reasons, one of the main problems that I have with the current healthcare system is that it makes its entire money, it makes its entire profit Off of cure rather than prevention, right?
This is what happens when people have a right to health care, then they're no longer responsible for their health decisions.
You know, I mean, they will tend to postpone difficult health choices like losing weight and exercising, changing your diet and all that kind of stuff, because there's no financial incentive for them to take care of themselves.
I mean, there is, of course, some financial incentive and generally you do better when you're healthy than when you're sick.
But you can make, you know, bad health decisions for years and years and years before it catches up with you, right?
I mean, you can eat lots of sugar and don't exercise.
And, you know, like when you're 55 or 54 or 50, you will get your diabetes, right?
So you can make lots of bad decisions, you know, and there's obese people who live into their 60s and so on.
So in the sort of day-to-day decisions, what you want or what would be a rational course of events in a sort of free market situation is that the financial costs of your health care bills in the future, assuming you had insurance, that your future health care costs would assuming you had insurance, that your future health care costs would be subjected or would be relative to the healthy choices you were making in the and
And, of course, one of the most healthy choices you can make economically is to say, you know, when I'm on my deathbed, don't make me linger.
You know, like, if there's no hope, then, you know, for heaven's sakes, just let me exit gracefully rather than sort of claw to life in this descending spiral hell of pain and, you know, burn up half my health care costs in the last couple of months of my life, which is, of course, what people You tend to do because, you know, euthanasia is illegal and, you know, it's not your life, it's the government's.
So, you know, they can't, you can't, you know, can't get rid of it.
Which is just this Christian hangover, right?
I mean, it's just this hangover that suicide is, you know, immoral and all this sort of nonsense.
So, you know, you're gonna have to make some choices about health care costs if in a sort of free market situation.
And, you know, there are lots of different health care choices that you can make.
I mean, you can say that I'm going to, you know, be a slob and, you know, eat badly and never get off the couch and, you know, sort of waste away within my own skin.
And then I'm going to throw myself on the mercy of, you know, common humanity, right?
So I'm going to sort of, you know, plead tears of, oh, I was ignorant, I was abused.
And just, you know, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of charity, right?
I mean, it's a perfectly valid strategy.
It's a tad risky because, you know, it's a little hard to feel sorry for somebody who's, you know, 300 pounds, who is complaining of, you know, poor knees or bad circulation or whatever.
But it's a perfectly valid strategy.
You know, who am I to say how somebody else should live their life, right?
I mean, in terms of like absolutely thunder from the pulpit that they shouldn't kill, they shouldn't steal, they shouldn't rape, they shouldn't whatever, right?
But as far as, you know, how you're gonna deal with your own health, good lord, I've got far better things to do than go nag people about, you know, health.
It's a personal choice.
All I want is to not have to pay for people who, you know, smoke like chimneys and, you know, exercise like vats of butter.
So, you know, that's a perfectly valid strategy.
Just, you know, do bad things to yourself and hope for charity.
You know, another one, of course, is to attempt to, you know, live as healthily as possible and, you know, save all the money and, you know, all of that and save the money that you've saved, you know, put it out of the things, you know, because you're going to get yourself covered and you're going to do a lot better because insurance companies are going to, you know, sort of be like the wives we all need if we're guys, right?
Who sort of nag us to get You know, the colonoscopy and, you know, with a prostate exam and all that kind of stuff.
And so, you know, insurance companies absolutely only make money if we're healthy, you know.
And again, I'm not talking about the current sluggish, torpid, state-controlled mess of public and private concerns in the American system.
I'm certainly not talking about the healthcare system in Canada, which is, you know, this sort of Soviet nightmare.
But, you know, in any sort of rational system, of health, you want to make sure that the incentives are the highest for, you know, the prevention of illness, right?
I mean, anybody who, you know, manages any sort of complex fixed-asset facility knows this, that, you know, reactive capital, i.e. something broke because I didn't maintain it, is 15 to 40 times more expensive than proactive capital, like let me replace the filter before the boiler bursts into flames.
So, you know, prevention is, you know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
It's So you want to make sure that a system which is going to be rational is going to want to obviously maximize the profit, minimize the loss, which means maximize the health and minimize the sickness.
It all makes perfect sense, right?
And if you choose not to maximize the health and minimize the sickness, i.e.
if you, you know, If you do bad things to your body, then, you know, it's a perfectly valid choice, but you have to pay for it, right?
It's certainly nobody else's responsibility but yours, your health, you know, unless they choose to make it their own through some sort of altruistic OCD compulsion.
So, you know, it really doesn't make a lot of sense to have a system which would have the opposite, where everybody makes money off curing things and nobody makes a penny off preventing things.
But of course, that would be a free market system where money is made through health.
And I think it's an old Chinese custom that you pay your doctor until you get sick, right?
And so his incentive is to keep you healthy and then he'll return you to health as quickly as possible.
So that would be a sort of free market situation that would sort of make sense.
But of course, the other thing that you want to do in a free market situation is not have any of this, you know, ridiculous state-enforced licensing, right?
I mean, this is just a complete cartel on healthcare that, you know, the doctor's union, I mean, let's not call the AMA and the CMA anything different, right?
The doctor's monopolistic cartel ...has, you know, completely violently cornered the market, right?
I mean, if I was able to say that me and my buddies are the only people allowed to program in .NET, you know, we'd make a fortune.
I mean, okay, maybe not in that particular example.
Let's say maintain Java code or something.
You know, we'd make a fortune.
And, you know, people would say, my god, we can't let the free market handle programmers because they're so expensive, you know, that nobody would be able to afford it if it wasn't, you know, subsidized and controlled and curtailed and if it wasn't a monopoly.
So, of course, this is what the doctors' unions did.
They said, okay, we now own this brand name called Doctors, and we are going to make sure that nobody else can come in and practice health care.
And the way that we're going to do that is we're going to treat all of the patients like complete, drooling, idiot children.
And not let them refill their own prescriptions.
I mean, of all the ridiculous things in the world, you know, if I have a sore throat and the only thing that cleared it up was tetracycline last time, then, you know, I'm gonna go and take tetracycline again.
And, you know, please don't give me this nonsense about that they need to control this, that, and the other, because, you know, what about if we all become immune?
I mean, they just prescribe this stuff like crazy anyway, so...
You know, as an adult, you know, with the internet and with, you know, a sort of fairly functional brain on my shoulders, I am more than happy to look up things on the internet and to take the advice of my pharmacist and dose myself.
You know, I mean, it's completely ridiculous.
I've never had a doctor, you know, give me more than 10 or 15 or 20 seconds of of, you know, thought or consideration at maximum.
I mean, I get a heck of a lot more attention from my pharmacist and I can spend as much time as I want on the internet.
And, you know, I really don't believe that a doctor is required for me to be able to dose myself with stuff that I've, you know, worked in the past and I can check with my pharmacist about, you know, any sort of whatever cross-pollination bad effects that might happen.
So, you know, you want to make sure there's no monopoly.
I mean, if you want to go to, you know, Joe Licensing Doctor, right, I mean some sort of private sector market could could license it So you absolutely would want to make sure that you know, there's none of this nonsense because it's completely immoral monopolies are completely immoral because you know It's a moral law has to apply to all human beings and a monopoly or a cartel by definition is composed of a pretty small minority of people You want to profit incrementally at the expense of everybody else?
So, you know, you have vicious competition among the health insurance companies.
You have no licensing among doctors other than those which are privately supplied and will be a hell of a lot better, by the way, than the medical union does now.
I mean, my God, you read about this stuff in the paper where, you know, Joe Doctorhead goes and, you know, abuses patients sexually for 12 years and he gets his license suspended for six months and a $5,000 fine.
I mean, my God, it's like he's a priest or something.
So, you know, let's not look to have any kind of regulation in terms of quality.
You know, I mean, if the doctor's union was at all interested in something like quality, they would simply publish the success ratios of the doctors who they represented.
You know, I mean, I can go and get all of the specs that I want about an mp3 player or a car, you know, but God help me if I want to find out, if I have prostate cancer, who's the best prostate cancer guy in the city.
I can't get the success rates of these people.
Why not?
Isn't that a fairly important thing to get when I'm shoveling over money to get cured from a life-threatening illness?
Wouldn't it be sort of important for me to be able to find out just who the hell is best at treating me and choose whether or not I want to pay the premium rates associated with that?
I mean, as a minor aside, I mean, this is the state of people's thinking in Canada, for sure.
I mean, I guess in the world, perhaps, maybe, as well.
But, you know, this old question about two-tier health care in Canada, which I talked about two podcasts ago.
So, you know, there's a letter in the newspaper, and occasionally, for sort of masochistic reasons, I'll go and have a look at these letters.
And, you know, this one person was saying, oh, we don't want to go back to the bad old days when you had to sell your house for the sake of a life-threatening um... operation you know to which my sort of thought was immediately of course Hell yeah, we sure do, because, you know, so I have to sell my house for a life-saving operation.
I can't really figure out what the hell good my house does me if I'm dead, so I can't really figure out why I would want to hang on to my house and be dead, you know?
I can't exactly enjoy it from the grave, you know, without scaring all the remaining people who live in it, so I just think that stuff's kind of funny, you know?
Of course, in Canada, you just really can't get these life-saving operations unless you've got a lot of political pull.
So, you know, at least if you had, you know, done something decent with your life in terms of making money and, you know, you'd worked hard, gone to school, you'd get some payoff or at least you could mortgage your house to save your life rather than, you know, claw at the outside of this, you know, heavily fortified healthcare establishment, this socialistic, you know, Venus flytrap and never get in and die anyway.
It's like, at least with that When you can sell your house, you've got a chance.
Now, if you're not a politician or have a best friend who's a doctor, you're food for worms, my friend.
you're just, you're just, you know, you're food for worms, my friend.
So, you know, that kind of thinking I always thought is kind of funny.
So, yeah, so you want to lower the costs, of course, and the costs will lower automatically to an optimal level in the free market, Everybody's aware of that.
And you want to make sure that you would never even dream of having a situation wherein you would have profit being made from illness.
You would always, always, always want to have profit being made from Prevention, right?
So, of course, you would have insurance companies that would absolutely, you know, force you to take blood tests and so on.
I mean, I know this because I've just gone up for executive insurance within my company and, man, they went over me with a fine-tooth comb.
I mean, they really did.
I'm surprised there wasn't things stuck up every orifice.
So, you know, and that was all good.
You know, I got my blood work back and, you know, I guess 20 years of working out has paid off.
I'm healthy, blah, blah, blah.
So, you know, they absolutely want to make sure that they're going to set their insurance rates for me or, you know, the health care rates for me as cheaply as possible to make sure that, you know, they're not going to be paying out some sort of a surprise amount of money because, you know, they didn't check whether I was taking care of myself or not.
So, you know, the free market aligns around reality.
You know, what it's very good at doing is figuring out reality because those who don't figure out reality don't tend to last very long in the free market.
So, you know, let's say for sure that a company is going... and, sorry, the reality is that, you know, prevention is much, much, much cheaper than cure.
And, of course, there's no cure for life as it stands.
You're going to die sooner or later and you want to make sure that you don't waste all your money doing, you know, very expensive health care at the end of your life when, you know, your days are numbered, so to speak, as it is.
So, you know, that is sort of the reality of the situation.
So the free market is going to work to optimize that situation.
So it is going to give you those kind of financial cues, or I guess you could say clues, but cues is probably better.
It's going to give you those financial cues, you know, right up front.
Right up front.
You are going to know, based on your current behaviors, what it's going to cost you
down the road in terms of health care because you know you're going to have you know propeller-headed actuarials beavering over this kind of data for decades and you know uh... and so you know your future health care costs are going to be an exact and you know down to the decimal point reflection of your current habits and health indicators so you are going to have a constantly moving and constantly calibrated gauge of you know the economic effects of your health care uh... choices so you have your sort of personal health care choices
You're gonna have that continually updated down the road.
And I remember, I guess this is sort of many, many years ago.
Gosh, how many?
10?
11?
You know, I was sort of toodling around on the internet and I came across a website.
This is back when you, you know, surfing the web was cool because of like, you know, 27 sites or something like that.
You know, and I came across the website of this guy who had decided to lose weight because His insurance was going sky high, right?
So he was a smoker, he was overweight, he didn't exercise, of course.
And so his health care bills were horrendous, right?
I mean, his insurance was going... So he's like, oh my god, I can't afford this.
You know, gym membership is 100 bucks a month and I have to pay 400 bucks a month more for this health care, right?
So he, you know, made the decision and, you know, quit smoking and lost weight and exercised and, you know, of course, gradually clawed back his health care expenses, his insurance health care expenses.
That, of course, is exactly the kind of feedback that you want to give to people.
You want to absolutely, positively make sure that they are getting as many cues as humanly possible for their For their, you know, their healthcare choices and proactively and positively and, you know, you want to guide them, right?
You don't want them to just sort of find out down the road that what they're doing is very expensive because, you know, people, you know, you got a donut sitting in front of you, you know, this kind of stuff.
Maybe I'm gonna get sick in 20 years.
I mean, this is not how people think.
It's not really how I think.
Well, maybe not.
I mean, a little sort of, I guess, I've always been sort of slightly obsessed with sort of working out and this and that, so.
So, I would say that you want to make sure that you give people as much feedback as possible right up front about the long-term consequences of their health care choices.
So, at least if they choose to make bad health care choices, at least they're not nailing other people with costs, and at least they're doing it with a full understanding of the financial consequences of what they're doing.
So, you know, that would sort of be a rational way that, you know, to organize health care because it, you know, it sort of reflects the reality of what it is that people are, you know, actually faced with in the world, which is, you know, cure is much more expensive than prevention.
So, you know, in a free market system, since the free market always, you know, pretty much adheres to reality in the long run, that's exactly what you would expect.
Whereas, of course, in, you know, and I'll just talk about the Canadian health care system, nobody makes a penny from prevention.
I mean, not at all, not even a dime.
Maybe dentists a little bit, but also dental plans.
But, you know, nobody makes a penny from prevention.
And so, you know, this is not something that you would ever set up as a rational system, right?
I mean, doctors will always make money when you're sick and they won't make a penny if you avoid getting sick.
So, it's the exact opposite of reality.
Right?
Because, you know, nobody, like the economy as a whole does not profit when people get sick.
But doctors in socialist or sort of a semi-socialist health care system, doctors do profit when people get sick.
So, you know, this is the exact opposite of reality.
And this is, of course, where violence leads you to, right?
Violence in terms of, you know, a coercive health care system that you pay for whether you want to or not.
And, you know, your premiums have nothing to do with your health care choices.
And, you know, Doctors are paid not for keeping you healthy but for treating you when you're sick.
Then, of course, what doctors want, pretty much, is they want a repetitive situation where you are constantly getting sick and never quite cured and yet never really sick.
That's sort of their ideal world that they want to live in or to deal with.
And, you know, of course, that's what you end up seeing in the health care system as a whole in Canada, for sure.
That, you know, I mean, these people treat doctors, you know, over and over.
They go over and over and over again.
And, of course, it's, you know, it's a complete haven for hypochondriacs, right?
Because that is, you know, you don't have to pay to the doctor to go to the doctor.
Boy, it really doesn't get any better than that in terms of You know, a happy land for hypochondriacs.
So, I mean, that would sort of make sense, you know, as far as I'm concerned, from a sort of preventable illness standpoint, right?
But, you know, of course, everybody knows that there's some things that happen in your healthcare world that are not your fault, right?
I mean, you might just develop multiple sclerosis or, you know, the old get hit by a bus thing.
Something may happen in your healthcare world that is simply not your fault.
And, you know, there is a certain perspective that says, well, look, Since it's not, you know, it's not a parent's fault that their child gets MS or something like that, and therefore, since it's sort of randomly the luck of the draw, it's not to the moral or just to say that they have to pay for it.
It doesn't really seem fair that random biological accidents of this kind should be an absolute financial stranglehold over the parents.
Well, I guess I have two responses to that one.
One is kind of cold and mean and the other one is sort of statistical and perhaps a little more gentle.
As far as fairness goes, I just think it's Well, it's stupid to use this sort of technical term.
You know, fairness is one of these things that's sort of this religious hangover that just doesn't...
Have any logical basis to it.
I mean, you know, reality is messy and biological life in particular is messy.
Things can happen.
Bad things can happen.
You know, we can all drop dead tomorrow.
We all could have an aneurysm forming, you know, a blood clot forming as you listen to this or as I speak.
I could be dead now.
This could be a voice from the grave because I got deep vein thrombosis, you know, driving to pick up my wife's gift.
So, you know, the idea that there's some sort of abstract fairness that biological tragedies are a deviation from is, you know, very much an idea that the universe is ordered and, you know, created by a rational deity and, you know, fairness is sort of the idea, you know, that there's a mysterious kind of fairness that, you know, that sort of exists.
And that, you know, is very annoying to me, just logically, right?
Because You know, the idea of fairness is clearly derived from the idea of an omniscient deity.
And, you know, yet, it would seem to me that if there was an omniscient deity which, you know, was so interested in fairness...
Then, you know, to interfere would not seem to me to make any sense, right?
So, if you say, well, it's bad, if, you know, it's not fair for someone's kid to get multiple sclerosis, then you've got this sort of fairness thing, and this is a deviation from it, and that fairness thing can only really come from the idea of a God, because, I mean, there's no such thing as reality.
In reality, it's fairness.
I mean, there's justice, which is a recognition of reality, But there's no such thing as fairness, like we're all born the same height or with the same level of intelligence or with the same quality of singing voices or anything.
So the idea that there's some sort of fairness and that it's unfair for a kid to get multiple sclerosis comes from a belief in God.
Yet, you know, if God gave the kid multiple sclerosis, surely it's a bad idea to interfere with it.
I mean, neither one gives any sort of sense that other people should fund, you know, the cure, or the maintenance, or the management of your kid's multiple sclerosis.
If there is a God, then maybe there's such a thing as fairness, but, you know, God gave this kid multiple sclerosis, so it's a test, and to interfere would be to thwart the will of God, and so on, right?
And if there is no God, then there's no such thing as fairness, and it's sort of ridiculous to talk about this as a deviation from some sort of standard, right?
I mean, there's no such thing as an even height for human beings that everybody is a deviation from, and it's all unfair.
You know, people are just as tall as they're tall.
You know, is it unfair for, you know, a guy to be short?
No, not really, because there's no such thing as fairness in that sense.
You know, is it fair that I sort of started losing my hair?
17 years of age?
Well, no, of course not.
I mean, it's not fair or unfair.
It's just my genetics.
It's just the way things are.
So, that's sort of my, sort of, cold, sort of, I guess you could call it cold, but just, you know, there's just no such thing as fairness in that sense, right?
The only thing that is even close to fairness is something called justice, which is just a recognition of reality.
You know, so it is just to recognize that there is no such thing as fairness.
I mean, that is a perfectly logical conclusion to come to because, you know, there's no evidence that there's any sort of force in the world that evens things out, right?
I mean, some people just are born to terrible lives.
And, you know, as sort of part of this, or perhaps it's a cause of this particular philosophy, I sure as hell did not get born into a beneficial family situation.
You know, as I've sort of mentioned before, my family was just horrible and violent and, you know, destructive and crazy.
I mean, my mom was institutionalized.
My brother is a sadist.
I mean, my father is just, ugh, wretched.
A wretched specimen of a human being.
We had no money.
I was constantly having to work.
I started working when I was 11.
When my mother was institutionalized, my brother was in England.
She stayed in bed for two weeks beforehand.
I had to go to school.
Eviction notices.
I guess I railed against it from time to time but I never really got the sense that it was fundamentally unfair.
Because, I mean, maybe, you know, this also sounds precocious, you know, because I was sort of 14, 13 or 14 when this was happening.
But it was sort of, I guess, outside of my comprehension that things could be different and I would be me.
Like I could say, It's not fair that I have this family, I should have another family, which is, you know, calm and peaceful and happy and blah blah blah.
But if I had that family, I wouldn't be me.
And so, and I kind of liked being me, and I kind of always have.
So even though there was, you know, terrible, you know, stress and strain and, you know, emotional horrors abounded, I still could never really figure out that it was unfair because the only way that you could fix that fairness would be to have me born to a different family and thus I wouldn't have these thoughts of it being unfair because I would be in that family and I wouldn't be me.
So to experience what I experienced in the family that I was born into, I had to be me.
So, I would only come up with the idea of unfairness if I was already in that unfair situation, and if I wasn't, I probably wouldn't.
So, I mean, that's sort of, hopefully not too convoluted, but that's why I never really understood it as an unfair situation, because I would have to, you know, want to be somebody else who would never think of it being unfair.
So, you know, the only reason I was thinking about fairness was because I was in this difficult situation, so wishing that it was somehow different would be to take away the whole mental causality that made me think of it in the first place.
Anyway, I hope that makes some kind of sense.
It does to me, and I hope I'm not alone in that.
So, you know, I guess good luck.
You can replay it if you like.
I think maybe on the fourth listen it'll make sense.
So that's sort of one.
And the second aspect to this thing called unfairness, I mean, this is true of life in general, not just the metaphysical, sorry, not just the healthcare issue, but I think it's very hard to say that any risk which can be predicted, which is not managed, which occurs, is unfair.
I mean, that is just a false proposition.
If you can predict a risk, and you fail to manage it, and it then occurs, then you have chosen To accept that risk.
I mean, all life is calculated weighing risks, right?
I mean, every time I drive to work, I can get creamed by an 18-wheeler.
But I like going to work because it gives me an income and, you know, I can use the company computer in my car to record my podcasts and stuff like that.
So I guess I would say that, you know, we all accept a wide variety of risks every day.
We manage those risks as best we can.
And, you know, I obviously try and drive as safely as possible, and I have car insurance, and I have life insurance, and I have disability insurance, and so on.
And that's my comfort level.
I mean, yours may be completely different.
You might, you know, as they say, you might enjoy frying bacon in the nude.
That may be your thing.
So, it really has a lot to do with, you know, what your comfort level is and what you like to work with from a risk standpoint.
And so, I guess what I would say is that if you are a parent who's expecting a child, then it would seem to me that it would be logical to To take out insurance against the possibility of your children getting ill.
Now, it's only logical to do that if you are not comfortable with the risks that result... Sorry, with what can result from failing to do that, right?
I mean, I'm trying to think of some kind of insurance.
I've never taken out insurance again against being hit by a meteor.
At least, I don't think I have.
My wife handles that stuff.
But I'm fairly sure, you know, we have an asteroid-free clause.
And so...
You know, that's a level of risk that I'm comfortable with.
And of course, if I don't get hit by an asteroid, it'll pay off pretty well.
Because I'll save the, you know, penny a day or whatever that, you know, one latte every three years.
But, you know, so if you want to take the risk and not take out any insurance for your children being born with, you know, some sort of birth defect or, you know, having some sort of childhood ailment, then, you know, you don't have to take out that insurance, in which case it's hard to sort of... I mean, certainly I feel sympathy, my god, I mean, it's a terrible thing, but, you know, I don't feel that this is a sort of
Metaphysical wrong or, you know, sort of fundamental unfairness that must be rectified by me, you know, being forced at gunpoint to subsidize the ailments of the child.
I mean, look, I mean, I'd be more than happy to, under certain situations, to subsidize, you know, to help children who were To help people who had this kind of problem, because, you know, I think we can all sympathize with, you know, it's not the child's fault for sure that the parents didn't take out insurance, so I can certainly sympathize with that.
But it certainly is something that the parents chose to... a risk that the parents chose to take.
And, of course, the reality is it is a risk.
The reality is it is expensive if you need to take care of a child who has those kinds of medical problems.
So, you know, as I sort of mentioned before, You know, justice is the recognition of reality, and the reality is that there's no such thing as fairness, and we know that there's no such thing as fairness, right?
Otherwise, moral people would never worry about getting hit by buses.
You know, I would never have disability insurance for cancer because, you know, the world is fair, and I'm a good guy who tries to do his best to spread the ideas of morality in the world, and therefore, wouldn't you know, The world will never let me get struck down with some kind of cancer.
But, you know, a recognition of reality is that there is no such thing as fairness.
You know, as I wrote in a poem probably 15 or 20 years ago, two men in a wood, one bad, one good, are both eaten by wolves.
You know, they taste kind of the same, right?
I mean, morality doesn't affect, you know, a material reality.
It affects your own conscience.
It affects your interactions with people.
But, you know, being a good person doesn't mean that you're not going to get sick.
And it doesn't mean that you're not going to have a child born to you who has a congenital defect that's going to be very expensive.
So, you know, the fact of the matter is there are risks in the world.
If you choose not to recognize those risks and work to ameliorate them, then if they strike you down, it's a terribly sad thing, but it's certainly no demand on everybody else that they have to subsidize your risks at gunpoint.
You know, one of the interesting things that happened, you know, when you fail to recognize reality, I mean, you know, bad, terrible, corrupt, horrible, awful things happen, you know, in the long run.
And, you know, one of the things that happened in the U.S.
health care system was that, you know, to some degree, you know, people were not taking out... people weren't taking out health care insurance, and then they were getting sick.
with something terrible.
And what happened was insurance companies, of course, would refuse to insure them.
It's like, you're already sick.
We can't insure you because otherwise we would just sort of be a charity in a bad way.
And so I think it's sort of fair to say that it's hard to blame insurance companies for not wanting to insure people who are already sick because the whole point is that you have to pay for the risk, right?
Once the risk is... It's like saying to the blackjack dealer, oh, I got 21, let me put $300 down instead of 5 bucks.
Well, he's gonna say, well, no, that's...
That's sort of not how the casino operates, because that's not how reality operates, right?
Risk is something that is, by its nature, ill-defined, right?
It's not a risk for me to say that I'm going to be dead in 200 years, you know, but it is a risk to say I'm not going to get cancer for the next 20 years.
So, insurance companies have to gamble because the reality of risk is that it is unknown, and if you let people wait for risk to become known, and then pay small premiums, then the whole system doesn't work from an economic standpoint.
You know, what happened in the States was, you know, a lot of sympathetic people sort of got together, you know, sort of stupidly sentimental people got together, and they said, well, it's really terrible, you know, that people who are sick, you know, get refused, get rejected for pre-existing conditions, right?
So there's a big move afoot in Congress and so on, and they got all this stuff going where you can't be rejected for pre-existing conditions and all that anymore.
And, you know, it's also blindingly predictable, right?
So they got this all passed.
And, well, what happened?
Well, what do you know?
As soon as it became permissible to apply for insurance and get insurance while you had a pre-existing condition, well, guess what?
Everyone goes, well, gee, I'm gonna save myself, you know, tens and thousands of dollars, and I'm simply not going to take out insurance until I get sick, right?
I mean, it makes perfect sense, right?
I'm not going to pay for insurance for 20 years if I can just pay for insurance for one month and save myself $50,000 if I can pay for insurance for one month and have exactly the same effect.
That would be a logical thing to do from a purely financial standpoint.
Yes, you're profiting from the evil corruption of the Congress, but it's not like you not doing it's going to change the law.
So I can certainly understand that particular approach.
So, you know, I mean, this is the ways in which a refusal to recognize reality completely corrupts and destroys a health care system, right?
So, what happens?
Well, a lot of people who've recognized all of this simply stop paying insurance.
And, of course, it tends to be the least honorable and the least responsible of, you know, all the people.
So, these people, of course, tend to have the most expensive health care costs, right?
I mean, a lack of responsibility is fairly well correlated with higher health care costs because, you know, you're not responsible and you're not going to take care of your health.
So, what happens is that, of course, the people who have the most expensive healthcare system Sorry, the most expensive health care requirements are the people who have simply stopped paying for it and then only pay when they need it.
So, I mean, the costs just go up blindingly.
I mean, like, unimaginably, right?
So, I mean, if you want to sort of wonder why all of your health care costs are going through the roof, it's, you know, it's for this kind of reason.
And, you know, it all makes perfect sense from an economic standpoint.
You know, you've got the people bailing out of the system who have the most expenses and then, you know, jamming all of their expenses based on one $400 Monthly check and then saying oh, yeah, okay now I want you know 50 grand worth of chemotherapy So, you know, this is the kind of stuff that happens politically Oh, if you're wondering what the background noises are, the sort of car alarms and horns and screams, it's because I'm trying to park at a mall for my wife's present.
And, you know, of course, it's, you know, two days, three shopping days, the third night shopping day before Christmas.
So, you know, love is in the air and the Spirit of Christ moves across the wilderness.
So, yeah, I mean, I just sort of wanted to point out that, you know, I mean, any moral system and any sort of political system Or certainly any economic system, let's say.
Because when I say politics, I probably mean something quite different than most people.
I mean, DROs and stuff.
But any political system that doesn't recognize reality, any economic system which uses force to destroy the facts of reality, will automatically cause incredible dislocation and You know, pain and destruction and will act against the very goal that is attempting to achieve, right?
So, you know, people say, oh, you know, these poor people who, you know, did not get their health care in order.
Boy, they're, you know, they're dying, they're sick, they're unhappy, they're sad.
Let's give them a break and let them get some health care insurance, you know, without, you know, with a pre-existing condition.
So, you know, you seem to be, you know, some sort of stupid nice guy.
And what happens then, of course, is that the inevitable occurs and you raise the price of health care to the point where other people who justly would want to pay it can no longer pay it.
And, of course, in the long run you end up with a complete collapse of the economics of health care.
At which point, of course, the government steps in and says, ah, you see, we knew the free market wasn't going to work.
All right, it's time to shop!
Thank you so much for your attention.
I hope this has been helpful and all the best.
I'm sure I will have a chance to chat with you again before Christmas arrives, but if not, or of course if you're listening to this after Christmas, unthinkable, I'm sure you download the minutes after I upload them.
Have yourself a very, very Merry Christmas.
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